Capitalista, Baby!

based on the novel 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand

Who is Ayn Rand? Born as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, she emigrated to the U.S. following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Rand worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood before publishing her first novel in 1943. “The Fountainhead” was later filmed with Gary Cooper assuming the role of brilliant and individualistic architect Howard Roark. 1957 marked the publication of Rand’s magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged“. In a survey conducted by the Library of Congress in the early 1990s, Americans rated “Atlas Shrugged” the second-most important book in world literature – surpassed only by the Bible. Ayn Rand’s disciples include the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan; Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is said be an admirer. In her books, Ayn Rand preaches heroic individualism, Objectivism (her philosophy of rational individualism), atheism, the virtue of selfishness and sex as self-exaltation. For Rand, the state, solidarity, the mainstream and mediocrity constitute the enemy. After tackling Peter Hacks’ controversial East German drama 'Anxieties and Power', directors Tom Kühnel and Jürgen Kuttner now take a journey into the heart of capitalism – which might also be at the heart of art itself.